Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is increasingly being used for transmitting safety information from one vehicle to another vehicle, for example in order to warn the driver of hazard situations or to provide support for driver assistance systems in the vehicle.
Experiments have shown that the wireless network engineering based on the IEEE802.11 standard is suitable, in principle, for setting up such ad-hoc communication networks in which the vehicles in the respective reception range are involved.
For the purpose of implementing suitable vehicle-to-vehicle communication, the IEEE802.11p standard has been agreed for future applications, said standard forming the basis for what are known as DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) systems, which relates to the physical layer and the data link layer                that is to say the bottom two layers of what is known as the OSI reference model for technical implementation of data transmission. In line with this standard, a plurality of wireless channels are used, from which one channel is used as a control channel. This control channel is used to periodically send vehicle status information. This means that all the network nodes which are present in the vehicles must continuously or periodically monitor said control channel. Transmission requests for other channels are initially communicated to the respective destination node on the control channel.        
Since the transmission methods of wireless networks (WLAN) are usually unsynchronized, i.e. the transmission and reception devices involved in the system do not have a common time base, separate frequency ranges are provided for normal information (subsequently also called infotainment) and safety information for safety applications, for example WLAN based on the IEEE802.11a/b/g/n standards for infotainment and WLAN based on the IEEE802.11p standard for safety applications. Another option for WLAN based on the IEEE802.11p standard is that a plurality of adjacent channels are used for the various tasks (pilot channel, service channel).
However, the use of different frequencies requires the use of different hardware. Usually, one receiver per channel is required. This means that a vehicle needs two hardware components in order to be able to cover both areas of activity (safety applications and infotainment).